Blogs

Blogs & RSS Feeds

October 20, 2004

Stamford, CT

Our second chapter meeting, held on October 20, 2004 at The Water’s Edge in Stamford, featured Steven M. Cohen as our guest speaker. Steven is Assistant Librarian at the law firm Rivkin & Radler LLP in Uniondale, New York. He is the creator of a well-regarded library weblog dedicated to resources for keeping current and professional development called Library Stuff. (www.librarystuff.net) In March 2004, Library Journal named Steven one of the library profession’s 55 Movers and Shakers.

FCC/SLA President-Elect Susan Stramiello and speaker Steven Cohen.

We had a very good turnout of about 30 people for this program and we were all quickly swept up by Steven’s abundant enthusiasm for his topic. Everyone in the room had heard of blogs and RSS feeds, but only one person was actually using them.

Steven started by talking about what a weblog is and its potential for use within libraries. In his speech, he conveyed that Weblogs make it easy to distribute content. They can be used as communications tools within our organizations, and are great for library web pages. He demonstrated the ease of creating a blog, and stressed that blogs can be set up very cheaply, or at no cost at all. And, that there is no need to download software. He pointed out the importance and impact blogs are having in some organizations, and how numerous public and academic libraries have already adopted this technology. Steven also provided some representative links in his presentation.

The other part of the program focused on RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds. Steven is a firm proponent of linking to feeds that provide him material he needs. There are several advantages to this technology. It is cutting edge, which is where we all want to be within our organizations. It saves time by cutting down on the need to travel around the Internet linking to various sites and pulling information from them. RSS feeds push new information to the searcher automatically. There are no ads or pop-ups. Some disadvantages to this technology are: inability to filter by keyword, and the potential for it to become unruly. A drawback is that, not everything out there can provide RSS feeds.

The end of the evening came too quickly. But, everyone left that evening with a clearer idea of how this technology works. The snippets of conversations that I heard at the end of the evening showed that many attendees were already pondering how to use it within their libraries and information centers, or for personal reasons.

Steven graciously gave a copy of his presentation to us to share with Chapter members who could not attend this meeting.